Thanatoptic designs

Peter Reading C61pp. Secker and Warburg. £3.95. 0436409844

I
ntimations of C - Peter Reading’s brilliant but ruthless new book of “poems”
about cancer - are to be found in the pamphlet 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5, produced
last year in collaboration with the Sunderland artist David Butler. In five
sections, each of five poems, each of five stanzas, each of five lines, each
of five syllables, we meet five dismal drunkards in the “Railway Hotel”,
each of whom suffers some more or less terminal misadventure before the end.
Jock, for instance, is a noisy Poly second-year, a rugby braggart with “too
much confidence, / no respectful fright / or awareness, yet, / of
mortality”. He is heavily tackled in a spontaneous rugby fantasy of our
author’s (scribbled on a beermat) and chokes to death on his gumshield. A
few pages later, though. Reading has compassionate second thoughts, and
brings in a surgeon to help repair the MS damage: “Tipp-ex and scalpel /
joined forces to clear / a throat obstruction.” Jock’s life is restored on
one utterly disabling condition: “EX- SCOTTISH PATIENT / EXHUMED AS ENGLISH“.
Meanwhile, a daft logician has been amusingly destroyed by a “sub-species”
of skinhead in the pub bog.

We look on these kinds of death and pain as the legitimate fictions of the
light-verse black comedian: grotesque retribution on those who are only
invented to deserve it, redeemable in joke resurrections. In 54,
poet and surgeon alike have the power of life and death; in C, by a bold
intensification of its author’s morbidity, poet and surgeon have no power at
all. The difference in atmosphere is pointed by the presence in each book of
a stock Reading figure; when the weak-hearted palaeontologist comforts
hiimself in 54, “What’s 40 years / here or there on the /
chronostratigraph?” he sounds drunk, but when the cancerous palaeontologist
comforts himself in C, with the same phrase. he sounds insane.

C is an even more demanding numerologicai structure. It pretends to be the
work of a versifying cancer victim, charting his last 100 days in 100 units
each of 100 words; and around this central figure Reading builds fossil
layers of “poor frail dear frightened little vulnerable creatures” dying in
isolation (the excellent acrostic “IN THE SAME VERTICAL COLUMN” follows five
storeys of hospital suffering down to the stoker in the basement). The
strange excitement of the book lies in the inappropriateness of the
admirable design, and especially of the medium of verse, to such a very
unliterary subject. Verse, indeed, is C’s first casualty. “Verse is for
healthy / arty-farties. The dying / and surgeons use prose” chimes an early
haiku; and prose subsequently outweighs verse three to one. Where they
survive, verse forms are gruesomely misapplied, so that we relish all the
more their impotence to explain, console, or cure. There is a sixteen-liner
on bedsores (from two angles); a limerick plus “cutely-adapted Adonic” for
fatal haemorrhage; catelectic (truncated) tetrameters to lament cut-off
breasts; a Japanese sonnet on a “stiff” in the chip shop; the thirteen-line
sonnet, invented “for unlucky people” in general; and a limerick with
“pretty Choriamb” to hymn the after-effects of a botched colostomy. In a
different admission of verse’s inadequacy, other pieces are hidden away in
prose settings; as the stunned craftsman instructs himself, “Run
them together, set as justified prose, / the inadequately blank pentameters“.
Harder puns than these link the breakdown of verse and body. Can metre and
punctuation contain the leakage of collapsed bowels? No - “pentameters, like
colons, inadequate”. Likewise, after the operation, “ars”
is “brevis”

Still, we ought to detach Reading’s ars from the arse of his
persona. Its most apparently reductive flourishes are carefully placed and
prepared for. The last words on verse, for example, are spoken by the tramp
Tucker who, in various guises, and in contrived partnerships with the “pale
horse” from Revelation, attends gloatingly on death throughout. Watching
another one borne away in an ambulance, he

- and perfect that unambiguously is. Besides, verse is not uniquely picked on
by the impartial cancer. “Not just me, but all of us . . .”; not just the
poet, but the palaeontologist too. These instructions for home care show
food and clothing to be just as “incongruous”:

Phrase questions to receive very simple answers, e.g.: “There is jelly and ice
cream or egg custard - would you like jelly and ice cream?” Pyjamas should
be absorbent.

So Reading, with a barrage of “Shit, blood, puke”, etc, takes us as close to
the facts of disease as any work of literature - including the medical
dictionary which supplies some of his text - is likely to want to do. He has
no interest in the distancing demeanour which more reverent poets might
adopt to deal with dying subjects; the dying “hate” us (Reading’s word) and
want our life, not our verse. His solution - sick in its way, no doubt - is
to join them, posing as “the Master of the 100 100-Word Units” who “chronicles
his death in the third Person” in a game which is deadlier by far than
the average earnestness. His daring even induces a certain dread for his
health - a peculiar achievement for imaginative writing. Section
Eighty-seven, a letter to his publishers (advising them chirpily that it
forms part of his last book, and that he is dead as they read it) is
awesomely unsuperstitious: “P.S. Seriously though, my wife will
deal with proof correction.” More than Reading’s, though, our own health
concerns us, and the book tweaks and probes at the general anxiety. One of
its truest episodes is that of a victim, not of cancer, but of fear of it,
who kills herself with twenty pills in Section Forty-four. There is the
merest shadow of an ironic triumph in the fact that our nameless hero, who
contemplates a bowery Virgilian suicide throughout, and collects the same
twenty pills, is too weak by the close - too nearly dead - to do the job.
And if the book’s coda displaces poetical emphasis, nevertheless it borrows
something of poetry’s affirmative habit as it moves unexpectedly to its
muted ten-thousandth word: “My wife patiently washes my faece-besmirched
pyjamas, for prosaic love.”